A plurality of such methods, apparatuses, and recording media, especially for renting or selling movies, audio files, or games, are known. For example, US 2004/0158871 discloses a Kiosk machine that allows customers to browse a title database, view title descriptions, and then have a copy of the titles saved to a DVD disk. Payment is effected via credit card. The customer can either purchase or rent the titles. The kiosk verifies the customer's age for compliance with age restrictions of the selected titles. For this purpose data on the customer's credit card or driver's license is read. As an alternative, an attendant may verify the age and provide a code that permits to access the selected titles. A drawback of this approach is that a plurality of recordable DVDs need to be stored in the Kiosk, which increases the size of the Kiosk. In addition, the renting or purchasing operation cannot be performed anonymously, as the user needs to give credit card information for payment.
In order to allow an anonymous renting or purchasing operation, and to circumvent the storage of recording media in the kiosk, it has been proposed to use prepaid recording media for payment of multimedia content. The recording media are bought in advance, e.g. in video stores etc., and have a certain value, which is then used for payment at the time of recording the multimedia content. As the purchase of the prepaid recording medium and the recording operation may take place at completely different times and different locations, the customer remains anonymous when recording the multimedia content. However, in case an age verification is needed to control access to specific multimedia content, at the time of the recording operation an identity card has to be provided. This means that the anonymity of the customer is no longer ensured.